Dying is typically the best move a person can make.

Suddenly everyone is your friend. If you have products available, many people will buy those products to find out what you were all about. In fact, you would probably be better off dead right now.

But for us suckers who are still alive and kicking, we have to kill time somehow. If you take a page from 2009's World's Greatest Dad, you may even be able to profit from those who go first.

High school poetry teacher Robin Williams' son Daryl Sabara is horrible. He's dumb, disrespectful and obsessed with porn. After he accidentally suffocates, Williams makes his death look like a suicide, forging an eloquent note that convinces the school Sabara was a misunderstood genius.

If you're anything like me, then you really need to shower already, because people are starting to notice. Also, your reaction to the frantic mugging of Robin Williams falls under the general umbrella of "should be beaten with batteries." To me, his need to please is so smotheringly overwhelming that the only possible response is to do some smothering of your own.

But I'm not the first to point out that this same liability makes Williams an awesome choice for dramatic roles where he plays a pathetic, needy man. In World's Greatest Dad, he's a failed author who's about to give up on his dreams. Meanwhile, he's losing fellow teacher and semi-girlfriend Alexie Gilmore to his more successful and athletic colleague. Oh yeah, and his son Sabara is so horrible that his organs probably couldn't be donated after he died for fear he'd infect others with his raging case of Jerkatitis C.

World's Greatest Dad is a movie of awkward humor and sometimes-cutting satire from noted American intellectual/funny voice guy Bobcat Goldthwait, the man behind Shakes the Clown. And like his clownly epic, it's one more piece of evidence that Goldthwait deserves a better reputation.

I didn't buy some of the dialogue, or that Williams, a poet and novelist, wouldn't know The New Yorker is a national publication. World's Greatest Dad's late-act emotional arc was rushed too. But it has a lot of laughs along the way, particularly when Sabara, who only talked about things I can't even reference here, is elevated to sainthood by students and teachers who project all their needs onto the angsty journal Williams releases under his son's name.

It's sharp, piercing stuff about how we exploit the dead. What, doesn't sound like a crowd-pleaser to you? Just wait until Williams leaps naked into a pool.

* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com.